planerange

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  Planerange in action!

Our Story

The three of us have always been interested in commercial aviation, and one of our most common questions is whether a given plane can fly a given route. We’ve complained for years now that we can’t find a website that does this for free with modern aircraft, so we decided to do it ourself.

We designed a simple web app built on Python and its underlying Matplotlib library to show a map centered around an airport that shows a circle showing a plane’s operating range. We published this Python app to the web using Django to make it publicly accessible. Our main challenges were choosing which map projections to use (some are very strange!) in addition to creating a web app using Django — none of us had ever used Django or any similar platform before, so it was an excellent learning opportunity to gain a new skill.

In the future, we are working on getting a custom domain for the web app, making the app more mobile friendly, and also adding a function that allows one to check whether a route between two airports is within range for a selected aircraft.

Built With

• basemap
• django
• html
• matplotlib
• python